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By Root 348 0

Nothing good ever came in the post, just bills, red reminders and threatening letters. Kitty was in the kitchen as I went to see what unopened horrors awaited me. As per usual, there was a pile of brown envelopes with red writing visible through the little window on the front. One of them looked even more threatening than the others. I ripped it open to be met by typical words such as collections, arrears and court. Mostly these were debts I was aware of, but this one was particularly unwelcome. ‘Student Loans Company’, shit. I had taken out a student loan during my first and only year at university. I had honestly forgotten about it, but they hadn’t and I owed them two thousand pounds.

With my wedding loan, credit cards and two Edinburgh Festivals, this made me over £30,000 in debt. Believe it or not, despite my appalling credit record, it was around this time I replaced my ‘sofa that turns itself into a bed’ with the Montana Ice three-seater from DFS on interest-free credit. The deal was that I paid nothing for a year and then paid about £150 for the rest of my life and the lives of any surviving relatives. Like most DFS customers, I only heard the first part about paying nothing for a year. I always thought it was funny that they give you interest-free credit on sofas. If people don’t have the money, they’re hardly going to get off their fat arses and make money if all you’re doing is making their fat arses more comfortable. Interest-free credit on treadmills, that makes more sense.

I debated telling Kitty about the Student Loan letter. She was worried enough about our mounting money problems. I felt I had to; I had to share it with her. We shared everything. I walked into the kitchen clutching my latest debt.

‘Darling, I’ve got some bad news,’ I said.

‘Well, I’ve got some good news,’ Kitty said.

‘What good news?’

‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she said, holding up a pregnancy test.

We were both desperate to start a family, but I was terrified about how to pay for a child. I was sinking deeper under-water financially, drowning.

‘What was your bad news?’ she asked.

‘Oh, forget about that,’ I said, stuffing the letter in my pocket, out of sight.

I then thrust us into even more debt by buying several pregnancy tests to make sure she was pregnant. There were three different varieties in Boots, all different prices. What’s the difference? Don’t they all do the same thing? Does the cheapest pregnancy test just say, ‘Maybe’ and the most expensive one say, ‘Yes, you are pregnant, it’s a girl and it’s not yours, she’s a slag’?

They were all positive. She was pregnant; I was going to be a dad. I had nine months to sort my life out. Nine months to take control of the mess that was my life and provide for my family.

I continued to do the same gigs as before. I had no chance of being spotted at these gigs, but what I could do was improve. I had battled with the dilemma over whether I should improvise onstage or do material. The Times had even spelled it out for me. I wanted to improvise, that’s when I was at my funniest. But the time had come to concentrate on my material. I pulled together all the best bits of improvisation, wrote them up as jokes and learned them. The results were almost instant. I suddenly had an act that was killing everywhere I went. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was basically improvising and riffing, but this time on my own, in front of my computer. I then fine-tuned and edited my thoughts and then tried them out onstage. I soon had hours of material and started to perform completely different twenty-minute sets every night.

Kitty’s pregnancy proved to be a fertile source of material, what with her coping with morning sickness by consuming ginger and Coca-Cola and her bizarre craving for the smell of rubber. One of my best jokes was about Kitty becoming pregnant:

I’m having a baby. It’s not easy to make a baby, my wife and I were trying for fifteen months. I say months because it’s a cyclical process, you have to wait every month for your opportunity to make a baby because of the way that women function.